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answered, clearly very happy that I showed interest in the subject. “They cut out the grammar in the name of their product because they don’t have a good enough grasp of language. One who knows that he is in the wrong naturally tries to convince everyone else that he is in the right; that is usually the way that information is passed on from man to man. They can produce an instrument that enables you to enjoy your favorite songs at thirty thousand feet above sea-level but when it comes to giving this remarkable instrument a name, they haven’t the ability to name more than a single copy; all the other copies are left in some problematic limbo. People all over the world who own the instruments are totally helpless because they don’t know how to name them when someone asks. But there is also the other possibility: that each copy is different.”
    He fell silent at this point, as if he was giving me the chance to say something. Then he asked for my opinion.
    â€œOn what?” I asked.
    â€œWhether each copy could be different?”
    â€œThat’s a question,” I said, and I realized as soon as I had said it that I had answered with this phrase before. It looked as if I had only one response on hand in reply to what the linguist was telling me and that answer had to include the word question.
    â€œBut I personally don’t believe that each individual product of this kind is unique,” he continued and pointed again at my tape player. “Isn’t it made somewhere in East Asia? Where everyone is virtually the same, whether he works with a conveyor belt or at a desk or stoops half starved over some paddy field?”
    I said I thought it was produced in Korea or Japan and restrained myself from objecting to his statement that all the inhabitants of these countries were the same.
    â€œHowever it may well be that they are all individual,” he said, as if he regretted having clumsily exposed his antipathy for Asians. “Maybe it’s possible to find some minute differences between one Japanese and another. But then we can also consider the opposite of Japanese technology: the Russian automobile industry! No two vehicles are the same. Each Lada, Moskvitch, or whatever it is called, is absolutely unique. Of course the Russian car comes into existence in a similar manner as most babies do, that is to say under the influence of alcohol or drugs.”
    Suddenly he pushed his nose up in the air and sniffed. Then he looked back towards the flight attendant, who was approaching with the food trays, and said:
    â€œIt seems as though they are going to treat us to something.”
    It flashed through my mind that Armann Valur could be as much under the influence as the Russian mechanics allegedly were. I thought it unlikely that the half glass of red wine he had drunk could stimulate those weird speculations on tape players and the book from Foyles. Not to mention the subject he moved on to next: that his favorite word was limbo . He felt that he, personally, was often in some kind of limbo, both in respect to his life as a human being, that is the life pattern —as he expressed it—and his life as a thinking individual amongst other thinking individuals, and often individuals who didn’t seem to think very much at all from one minute to the next. But whatever the outcome, and maybe exactly because of these thoughts of his, I was beginning to enjoy Armann’s company—even though he was certainly one of those personalities one would never wish to have as a lifelong acquaintance or consider inviting home.
    The aroma of the food seemed to have taken complete control of Armann and he had definitely lost all interest in those forms of research into which he had been giving me glimpses. He managed to stuff the book back into his pocket with a certain amount of difficulty—although it was a paperback it was too big for an average sized pocket—and he got ready